A row of vinegar bottles from pale white wine vinegar to deep red wine and dark sherry vinegar beside a stoneware crock, a wild rose vinegar bottle and a small dish of salad greens

Vinegar: The Complete Guide to Wine, Sherry, Cider, Rice and Fruit Vinegars (and Everything That Is Not Balsamic)

Every bottle of vinegar is a bottle of something else that a bacterium got to first. Wine, cider, sake, beer, honey wine, fermented rice: leave any of them open to the air and a family of bacteria called Acetobacter will arrive, eat the alcohol and leave acetic acid behind. The French word is vin aigre, sour wine, and it is a reasonably complete description of the process.

What it does not describe is the range. A great sherry vinegar tastes of walnuts and dried figs. A rice vinegar tastes of almost nothing but clean acidity, which is the point. A slow-made red wine vinegar from an Orléans-style crock has the fruit of the wine still in it, and a factory vinegar made in a day tastes like the acid alone. This guide, which sets balsamic aside because we gave it its own guide, explains how vinegar is made, what the major types do, what the label tells you, and how to cook with acidity the way restaurants do.

Two fermentations

Vinegar takes two steps. First, yeast turns sugar into alcohol: grape juice becomes wine, apple juice becomes cider, rice becomes sake. Second, in the presence of oxygen, Acetobacter turns that alcohol into acetic acid. The bacteria live on the surface where the air is, forming a slippery cellulose raft called the mother of vinegar, and they work slowly, which is where the two methods part ways.

The traditional method, named for the French city of Orléans that supplied Paris with vinegar for centuries, lets the second fermentation happen on its own time in partly filled wooden barrels, over weeks or months, at cellar temperature. Because the process is slow and never boils off the aromatics, much of the character of the original wine survives. The industrial method pumps air through the liquid in a heated tank and finishes the job in a day or two. It makes a perfectly clean vinegar and a rather empty one.

The acidity on the label, usually between five and seven percent, is the concentration of acetic acid. In the United States a product cannot be called vinegar below four percent. A six or seven percent vinegar is noticeably sharper than a five, which matters when a recipe was written with one and you are using the other.

Wine vinegar

Red and white wine vinegar are the workhorses of French and Italian cooking, and the gap between a good one and a bad one is wider than for almost any other condiment. A slow-made wine vinegar keeps the fruit, tannin and body of the wine, so that a vinaigrette tastes of something beyond sour. A cheap one is acid and little else. The crock is the tell. Pommery, the Meaux mustard house that has kept its stoneware jars for centuries, sells its red wine vinegar in one, and it is the right vinegar for a classic Dijon vinaigrette: three parts olive oil, one part this, a spoon of Dijon, salt. Red wine vinegar also belongs in a pan after searing meat, in a pot of braised lentils, and over roasted beets.

White wine vinegar is the same idea without the tannin, and it is the right choice when color matters: a beurre blanc, a pickle brine for onions, a dressing for delicate greens. Champagne vinegar is a white wine vinegar made from the same grapes as Champagne, softer and finer, and is mostly a pleasure of restraint.

Sherry vinegar

If we could keep only one vinegar in the kitchen, it would be this one. Vinagre de Jerez is made in the sherry triangle of Andalusia from sherry wines and aged in the same solera system of stacked barrels that ages the wine, so that each bottle blends vinegars of many ages. The protected designation sets minimums: six months for basic, two years for Reserva, ten for Gran Reserva. The result is nutty, oxidative, slightly sweet and deep, closer to a spirit than a sour. A few drops finish a gazpacho, a lentil soup, a pan of mushrooms or a plate of grilled fish, and it is the acid that makes our meatless beans taste like they were cooked with ham. A Reserva-level sherry vinegar is worth buying whenever one is in stock.

Cider vinegar

Cider vinegar is apple wine turned sour, and a good one tastes distinctly of apples with a rounder, less aggressive acidity than wine vinegar. It is the vinegar of English, Normandy and American farmhouse cooking: in a slaw, in barbecue sauce, in a brine for pork, in a warm dressing for cabbage. The unfiltered bottles with a cloud of mother in them are not superior for cooking; they are simply unfiltered. The health claims attached to cider vinegar in recent years are mostly unsupported by good evidence, and we would rather you buy it for the flavor.

Rice and other Asian vinegars

Japanese rice vinegar is mild, clean and low in acidity, and it seasons sushi rice, dipping sauces and quick pickles without shouting. Chinese black vinegar, most famously Zhenjiang (Chinkiang) vinegar, is made from glutinous rice and aged until it is dark, malty and faintly sweet, and it is the acid in a dumpling dipping sauce and a bowl of hot and sour soup. The two are not interchangeable. Our Asian ingredients shelf is where to look for both.

Fruit and infused vinegars

A fruit vinegar can be made two ways, and the label should tell you which. The honest version ferments the fruit itself: strawberry wine into strawberry vinegar, raspberry wine into raspberry vinegar. The shortcut steeps fruit or fruit syrup in a finished wine vinegar, which produces something sweeter and simpler. Both have uses. A bright strawberry vinegar makes a dressing for tomatoes and burrata that needs no sugar, and a spoonful stirred into sparkling water is the fastest shrub in the world.

At the far end of the category sits Noma Projects' Wild Rose Vinegar, from the Copenhagen restaurant's fermentation lab, which the producer describes as a vinegar built on wild rose petals. It smells like a garden after rain and tastes sharp, floral and slightly tannic. Use it in tiny amounts on raw fish, over strawberries, in a dressing for shaved fennel, or in a spritz. It is a finishing vinegar, not a cooking one, and it lives beside the Mushroom Garum on our shelf for a reason: both are ways of adding a whole idea to a dish with a teaspoon.

The sweet neighbors: saba and white condimento

Two bottles on the vinegar shelf are not vinegar at all. Saba, or mosto cotto, is grape must cooked down slowly until it is a dark, sweet, faintly tart syrup. It is the ancestor of balsamic vinegar, older than the vinegar itself, and Acetaia Leonardi's saba from Modena is the version to keep: pour it over ricotta, roasted squash, aged cheese or vanilla ice cream, or stir a spoon into a pan sauce for duck. White balsamic condimento, like Acetaia Malpighi's Prelibato, blends white grape must with white wine vinegar and skips the long caramelizing cook, producing a pale, sweet-sharp dressing for fruit, fish and salads where a dark balsamic would stain and dominate.

Cooking with acid

Restaurant cooks reach for vinegar the way home cooks reach for salt, and often for the same reason: the dish tastes flat. A splash of acid at the end brightens a soup, cuts the richness of a braise, wakes up a pot of beans and makes a plate of roasted vegetables taste like more than sweetness. The rule is to add it off the heat, in small amounts, and to taste between additions. A dish that needed acid will suddenly taste like itself.

Matching the vinegar to the dish is mostly a question of weight. Delicate food, delicate vinegar: rice or Champagne vinegar for raw fish and soft greens. Rich food, deep vinegar: sherry vinegar for lentils, mushrooms and game. Fruit vinegars where you would otherwise add sugar. Red wine vinegar for anything that had red wine in it or wants to. And the oil left in a tin of good fish plus a spoon of sherry vinegar is a vinaigrette that took ten seconds.

Storage

Vinegar keeps almost indefinitely; its acidity is its own preservative. Keep bottles capped and out of direct sun. A cloudy strand or a jelly-like disk forming in an unpasteurized vinegar is the mother, and it is harmless; strain it out or leave it. Crocks and dark bottles exist because light slowly dulls the aromatics, which is why the good producers use them. Sediment in an aged sherry vinegar is normal.

Where to start

For the kitchen: the Pommery red wine vinegar in its crock, and a sherry vinegar when one is in stock. For finishing: the Wild Rose. For dessert and cheese: Leonardi saba. Everything is in our vinegar collection, beside the olive oils that complete the sentence, and it ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, or come taste at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver. The gods drank nectar; the cooks on Olympus, one assumes, kept a crock of something sour for the beans.

Sources & Further Reading

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